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Sunday, 20 October 2013

Gallifrey VI: Ascension written by Justin Richards and directed by Gary Russell

What’s it about: Gallifrey Rises… Romana’s sacrifice sees Gallifrey restored to its former glory, but at a terrible cost. As the Time Lords begin to reclaim their stronghold, Leela and Narvin find themselves trapped in a decaying reality… and only K9 can help them. As old friends fight to reunite, new threats lie in wait… Because Braxiatel was right: war is coming.

Presidential Babe: Romana scoffs in the face of being
elected to bring the alternative Gallifrey back up to scratch. Given recent events
she has long given up any kind of delusions of grandeur and settled on a much
more remedial role of trying to restore her own Gallifrey to its former glory
but as an architect, as a healer. She publicly abdicates, informing her people
that she is not the person that they want her to be. She has served Gallifrey
for a great many years and now they need a new President for a bold new
Gallifrey. It is the last thing that she needs. Even if it came to the
destruction of Gallifrey, Romana would never order the murder of her friends.

Noble Savage: Leela is wise enough to recognise that there
is not only calm before a storm but after one too. She’s also smart enough to
realise that Romana cannot be dead because her future incarnation is still with
them. Even animals know that the hunt is as much about training the body and
Leela keeps herself in great condition. When Trey and Narvin are bitching and
sniping at each other, Leela is the voice of reason in a cold, empty world.
Leela takes an impossible decision out of Romana’s hands, pressing the reset
button on her behalf.

The Other Romana: It is only when her planet in under threat
that the new Romana shows her teeth, dropping the silky voiced act and barking
out orders.

Standout Performance: This is your last chance to listen to
the collective ensemble of Lalla Ward, Louise Jameson, John Leeson, Juliet
Landau and Sean Carlsen. The one redeeming feature.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘The Matrix is damaged and I am no
trapped inside it.’

‘With all due respect…’ ‘That’s what people say when they
are about to disagree emphatically.’

Great Ideas: Whether it was deliberate or purely
co-incidental I am not sure but as we slip between the two realities in the
finale the accompanying sounds just like that which greeted the shift in
universes in Inferno. It gave me a fanboy thrill every time I heard it.
Matthias resigned because of what he had to do, dealing with the virus at a
terrible cost. Anyone that couldn’t be cured was contained. It led to civil
war, the matrix damaged, corrupted and without it was the last straw for the
President. Using technology forbidden since the old time he incarcerated the
victims of the Dogma virus in time locked facilities – wouldn’t it have been
great if we could have visited one those facilities? How creepy an idea is?
Institutes full of deranged Time Lords, imprisoned by Shada technology. Talyn
was the presence that everybody felt in Annihilation, an avatar created by K.9
to do his bidding within a Matrix projection. If Romana restores the Matrix to
its factory settings (what a lovely, simple idea for such a complex system)
then all organic components inside (Leela, Narvin) will be erased as it
reboots. The projection Trey gives Leela a message for Romana, to tell her that
they will meet again one day. The Daleks created the original Dogma virus and
have been hiding away in the Matrix whilst it did its work on Gallifrey.

Audio Landscape: Darlington’s sound design for series VI has
certainly been a step up from the previous season but I have to be honest, the
impressive Dalek invasion aside, things have been pretty quiet ever since.
Romana appearing out of nowhere, banging the Rod of Rassilon, K.9’s nose
blaster, falling rubble, alarm systems, plague victims escaping, exterminating
blasts.

Isn’t it Odd: When Romana ‘died’ in the previous story it
wasn’t at all what anybody thought, not a regeneration but a temporal spatial
shift. She fell through a door into the Matrix where nothing and nobody that
she meets is real. Hang on…does this mean seasons four and five were all set
within the Matrix? Or did they slip into the Matrix when they appeared
to get back home in the previous story? At first I thought this was going to be
one of those unreality within unreality stories where you have to decide for
yourself which is the true Gallifrey and which is the projection. The whole of
Annihilation was a forgery? The Gallifrey that I thought was Gallifrey Prime
was a fake? Handing me everything I wanted on a platter and then snatching it
away? Trey who is such an intriguing character is simply a Matrix projection of
a future Romana? How is any of this a satisfying conclusion? My least favourite
plot device of all time gets an airing here…the reset button. How a planet wide
reset button makes any sense is beyond me but apparently Romana can wave her
magic wand and make all the victims of the Dogma virus better through a quirk
of technobabble. How is that a better option than the long, hard struggle route
of Annihilation? A quick fix solution after all their struggles seems so…glib.
I’m trying to get my head around the shock twists that take place in Ascension.
Somehow the Daleks were behind the Dogma virus all along despite their
involvement never being hinted at before? I’m not sure if Agatha Christie would
approve of a phoney reveal like that. It seems to me like an excuse to tie this
series into the Time War…but Annihilation had already achieved that with much
more subtlety (it’s events all deleted as a fake now). Because the story is
never entirely clear I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was saying that
series four and five (the Axis years) were all taking place in the Matrix (I
guess so since the Daleks of Extermination emerge from the Matrix rather than
in the Axis) or not. But if so, that’s another absurd twist that has come from
nowhere. You can’t just turn up at the last minute and go ‘this is what has
been happening all along!’ with no foreshadowing whatsoever. Apparently
Trey knew of the Daleks’ schemes all along and created a false Gallifrey in the
Matrix to trap them in? Huh? They don’t even begin to explain away that
one.It’s the equivalent of a bunch of
friends knowing a secret and one person being kept out of the loop and once
they have been informed that person going ‘Hah! I knew that all along…I
invented the secret in the first place!’ And just as plausible. The whole
reason we went through the events of Annihilation was to create a trap for the
Daleks…or something. Even K.9 is baffled by the news. Oh, and why mention Brax
in the blurb when he doesn’t appear? Surely that is inviting disappointment?
Plus there seems to be very little emotional finish to this series, it’s all
plot plot plot with very little time for the characters to get a satisfying
send off.

Standout Scene: What about the random last minute twist of
Narvin effectively starting the Time War by sending the fourth Doctor to Skaro
in Genesis of the Daleks and kicking the whole sequence of attacks off? That
strikes me of Gary Russell trying to squeeze in every bloody moment of
continuity that he possibly can into this series, just like when he tried to
explain away Romana’s regeneration is series two of Gallifrey. It’s so out of
left field that it barely deserves comment. It feels like a last ditch effort
to throw everything but the kitchen sink at this series when there is no time
whatsoever to deal with the consequences of this reveal. It smacks of
desperation to end on a big finish (hoho) when there is still so much of the
story they have set up to unravel without adding retarded complications like
this. Gallifrey was never about the Daleks but for some reason that has become
the lynchpin of the finale. ‘It’s not as though you’ve just started up another
temporal war after I have just averted one…’ Yes, that’s right folks. The Time
War was kick started to justify a dreadful gag at the end of a Big Finish range
that’s gone awry… Unbelievable.

Result: Hang on…what the hell is this? All the events
of Annihilation wiped away as though they never happened? Trey was never real
but a Matrix projection? The entirety of season four and five took place in the
Matrix (possibly, it’s never entirely sure about the fact)? What the hell is
going on? This is exactly the sort of story Justin Richards wrote for the first
three seasons of Gallifrey, one which opens slowly and builds up it’s requisite
ideas before exploding with twists and turns in the second half and generating
a great deal of excitement from his mind-busting notions. It’s not his fault
the ideas are so nonsensical, rendering the events of the second (and superior)
story of this set worthless. It seems entirely appropriate to me that Richards
should be brought on board to finish the Gallifrey range because to my mind he
was the most consistent writer to contribute to the series and the only one to
make create anything of worth during the wilderness seasons (Disassembled was
the one beacon of light in series four and five). A shame then that this is easily
his weakest story of the six seasons, purely because the ideas in play are all
vying for prominence and none them get a chance to breathe. It is confusing as
an individual story but also manages to muddy what was shaping up to be a
pretty straightforward and fascinating final series. It’s a story that is
trying to be too clever by half…and I rather like too clever but there has to
be some kind of internal logic to hang the narrative on. Which Gallifrey is
real and which is an illusion? Are we still in the Matrix? Are the Daleks the
be all and end of this series all along? Did they really create the Dogma
virus? Is Narvin responsible for the Time War? I don’t think it matters very
much anymore. And so what looked like it was going to be a renaissance for
Gallifrey turns stumbles at the last hurdle. To my mind Annihilation would have
made a much more impressive series finale with the explosive cliffhanger of the
previous story a much more attention grabbing final twist than the open ended
climax to this story. It breaks my heart to see a range that I once loved almost
get the stunning ending it deserved and plunge over a precipice into madness
during its climax. The fact that the Gallifrey rises… tagline is all
down to the push of a massive reset button disguised as a quirk of technobabble
means that the whole of series four, five and six (aside from this one tale)
has effectively been an irrelevant distraction. They should have just jumped
out of the Matrix and punched the reset and we could have gotten everything
back to normal in record time. And worse, the first step on the road to the
Time War was made to excuse a godawful joke at the tail end of this range. It’s
time to put this old dog down: 2/10

12 comments:

With one (fairly big exception) I did like this capper to Season 6. I totally wasn't bothered about the things you were...

For the last year plus, I've ONLY listened to Big finish dramas during my 83-mile drive to work, and often, my expecations haven't been that high - really, all they need to do is keep me sane/awake while I drive the barren plains of eastern Wyoming...

But for this final episode, I finished part 2 as I arrived at home. So... soon after I got home, I had to go and put my MP3 player back in, and go for a walk around the town, in the dark listening to the story. I just had to continue onward!

A couple of days ago I said that some things must rub you the wrong way compared to me, and Wow, I think this is another example. I was captivated, entranced and drawn along this story.

However, I will repeat a comment I made on the Big Finish message boards:

"I loved the ending as well.

...Then I started thinking about it.

Okay, so Narvin was the one that instigated sending the 4th Doctor to Skaro for Genesis of the Daleks. That implies that the timeline this whole Gallifrey series comes from is one in which the 4th Doctor did not go to Skaro, and that he's created a new timeline. However, our Romana has already been effected by that timeline! Lalla Ward's first adventure was in the sequel to Genesis, one in which she meets a Davros that knows the 4th Doctor... Sorry, my brain is starting to hurt here. "

And that is my main nitpick with this. It is totally illogical. I've been a huge fan of the sci-fi author Harry Harrison over the years, and in numerous interviews he said his approach to sci-fi fiction was "backplotting" - he would start with the ending of the story, and the write it backwards to the beginning, his goal as an author was to build the story in a way that both "worked" and led to that ending, but fooling/surprising the reader along the way. Well... this story certainly has a feel that the ending was written first. But then the leadup to it was not at all developed to lead into it. A totally Harrison-style Fail here, which annoyed me.

But for that I think the episode was good. No problems with acting or sound design (and something of a "sound designer" myself, I feel I have a valid viewpoint) So it's down to the illogical twist that brings this one down for me. I'd give it 7/10...

I thought the sound design and music were rather sparse and ineffective, personally. I write reviews, but I wouldn't lay claim to have any superior knowledge in that field because I do.

I thought this was a complete diversion from where this series was heading and loaded with bizarre shock revelations that had no foreshadowing. It also offered no closure to the characters whose exploits we have followed for six seasons. It was the very did initial of a damp squib ending for me.

I'm not sure where I thought Gallifrey would end up...but it wasn't here.

I think we're actually on close to the same wavelengths here... Just your level of "hate" for most of the final episode far exceeded my own. My own temporal headache nitpicks didn't displace my liking for the rest of the story as much as it must have for you!

I have to ask - did you bother to listen to the "behind the scenes" disc? I did today (no, yesterday), while doing yardwork. I did think it was nice to hear both comments on the entire series, plus ones regarding these final episodes. And the Mary Tamm tribute at the very very end was very nice indeed.

I think you didn't actually follow this story at all. They only entered the matrix when they left the gallifrey of Slyne. Narvin started the time war because that's what he always did. Now we just know why the timelords acted so out of character as to send 4 to skaro. That's what always happened. It never made sense before - now it does.